Downtown L.A.

I Need a Place that Restores My Spirit in an Efficient Hour

Escape. I have come to realize that only regular and solitary immersion in a gorgeous, inspiring place keeps me sane and energized for my life’s work. I need to be gobsmacked by beauty, the kind found only in nature or art: That “thing outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves,” as poet Adrienne Rich put it. For me, it must be a place that leaves me so filled with awe, or what some call God, that I can’t even talk right for an hour.